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Carla Hendra

Global Chairman, OgilvyRED Ogilvy & Mather

I joined Ogilvy on April 23, 1996, as the digital and demand generation lead for the IBM global business. Between 1998 and 2009, I served as President of OgilvyOne North America, Co-CEO of Ogilvy & Mather North America, and Chairman of Ogilvy New York. In 2010, I became founding Chairman of OgilvyRED, which provides strategic and innovation consulting services to clients globally.

The branding and marketing services industry faces change of geometric proportion, as do many of our clients’ businesses. It’s a dream job to be leading Ogilvy forward strategically as technology opens up an entirely new kind of creativity for our clients’ brands.

OgilvyRED was created to offer strategic advisory and consulting services within the context of both creativity and rigorous effectiveness. Ogilvy & Mather has an unparalleled depth and breadth of strategic services, which are extended by the many capabilities of WPP. OgilvyRED’s job is to unlock the value of these capabilities on behalf of clients in order to solve our clients’ toughest growth and innovation challenges.

We will partner with Ogilvy group companies, WPP and several external strategic partners to assemble custom teams of experts who range from marketing consultants to brand architects to digital innovators.

Digital is the most relevant topic in all of advertising and marketing today because every kind of communication has “gone digital.” Ogilvy’s digital offerings range from strategy to creative to technology to media – focused on realizing the magic of digital and its ability to let people actually experience brands in new ways. From luxury brands to service brands to consumer goods to B2B brands, the biggest changes in our industry have come from innovation around the Internet. As bandwidth, speed and access continue to grow, we’ll continue to see digital acceleration as more and more marketers look at digital as an essential aspect of their marketing mix and their brand growth. A huge opportunity for Ogilvy is realizing the business potential and growth that new digital and data technologies make possible.

My favorite career highlight at Ogilvy is the privilege of being founder of Verge, the Ogilvy Digital Summit Series, in 2004 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Since then, we have held several more of these global conferences: in San Francisco at the SF Museum of Modern Art, and at the Jazz at Lincoln Center. The Verge conference has been held in more than 30 countries around the world. These events showcased some of the most important contributors to innovation in the Internet’s brief history, which helped educate our clients about the huge changes in consumer behavior and set a vision for the constant change, which is characteristic of the digital age.

I have so many favorite David Ogilvy quotes. But as I think about the key to our business, it more than ever comes back to talent. So my favorite D.O. quote is: “If you always hire people who are smaller than you are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. If, on the other hand, you always hire people who are bigger than you are, we shall become a company of giants.”